As an indictment of the death penalty, the most unsettling aspect of My Days of Mercy is in how it presents the terrifying orderliness of taking a human life.

My Days of Mercy

Sold as a clash between two opposing viewpoints, My Days of Mercy (viewed at TIFF 2017) is in fact staunchly against capital punishment, but makes an unusual argument for that position. Instead of focussing on whether the condemned man is guilty or innocent, and whether it's wrong to make him suffer either way, the screenplay, written by Joe Barton, dramatizes the pain and horror of his family -- people who haven't committed any crime, but have to wait for a loved one to be killed, knowing there's nothing they can do to stop it.

Lucy (Ellen Page) is a professional demonstrator who travels to executions across the country to protest the death penalty. Although it initially seems that her obsession is based on principle alone, we soon learn that Lucy's father is on death row for murdering her mother, making Lucy a victim of the original crime, as well as of the sentence that will take her father's life.

While Lucy's sister, Martha (Amy Seimetz) is convinced of their father's innocence, Lucy, who was only a teenager at the time of the killing, has her doubts while understanding that overturning the guilty verdict is the only way to save his life. Her presence in the line of chanting protesters is a form of prayer -- a ritual repetition of words and action that she hopes will somehow bring her torment to an end.

Lucy's foil and eventual love interest is the conservative Mercy (Kate Mara), a woman who initially shows up with a wave of counter-protesters who've come to celebrate what they see as an act of justice. Mercy honestly believes that being able to watch an execution will bring the victims a sense of peace and closure, and goes so far as saying she wants Lucy to have the same good feeling when her mother's killer is dead. Once they've stumbled into a low-key courtship, Mercy uses her legal connections in an attempt to prove Lucy's father's innocence and sidestep the awkward question of how she will feel if he's guilty.

The latter half of the film at times feels padded with a subplot about homophobia. Lucy is suddenly a pariah in her town because the girls she went to high school with know she's a lesbian. The secretive Mercy is hiding a boyfriend at home and lectures that Lucy can't “decide for [her]" when it's time to come out of the closet. None of it seems related to the central plot, and could have been left on the cutting room floor.

The parts of the film that stay focussed on the death penalty, though, are outstanding. As an indictment of the death penalty, the most unsettling aspect of My Days of Mercy is in how it presents the terrifying orderliness of taking a human life. The procedures, and hearings, and paperwork, and timelines, and the painful lack of difference that any amount of screaming while carrying a placard is going to make.

The inside of the prison system isn't dramatized at all aside from a series of vignettes in which the final meal requested by each condemned prisoner briefly appears on screen. What begins as an impersonal curiosity takes on a staggering power once the prisoner becomes someone we know and, just by showing us plates and trays, director Tali Shalom-Ezer is able to pull us inside that terrible moment -- the moment of seeing your last meal, of choosing it, of planning, and waiting, and knowingly walking to death on the day your life ends.

No matter how much lip service it gives to Mercy's point of view, and to the idea that a reasonable person could believe it, the film uses a similar series of almost unbearably ordinary scenes to force us to live inside the crawling, suffocating horror of watching as the machinery of the state slowly and deliberately murders one of its citizens. This is not an accident or a crime of passion – this is a cold-blooded, impersonal, calculated act that takes years to plan.

I grew up in a country that effectively ended execution 20 years before I was born, and it's very easy to sell me on the idea that the death penalty is wrong. Films like The Life of David Gale (Alan Parker, 2003) get under my skin, because they seem to take for granted that the only presumed problem with state execution is that an innocent man might be killed. I also recognize that films about the suffering of the guilty don't move everyone. That's why we need films like My Days of Mercy, to remind us that no one is alone in the world -- that when the state kills someone, regardless of what that person's done, it's killing someone who was loved. The pain doesn't wash away because prosecutors are satisfied that what they've allowed to happen is right.

A horror movie and a love story in its own right, My Days of Mercy is a new take on an old but pressing issue, rooted more in deeply emotions than philosophical arguments.

White Hills epic '80s callback
Stop Mute Defeat is a determined march against encroaching imperial darkness; their eyes boring into the shadows for danger but they're aware that blinding lights can kill and distort truth. From "Overlord's" dark stomp casting nets for totalitarian warnings to "Attack Mode", which roars in with the tribal certainty that we can survive the madness if we keep our wits, the record is a true and timely win for Dave W. and Ego Sensation. Martin Bisi and the poster band's mysterious but relevant cool make a great team and deliver one of their least psych yet most mind destroying records to date. Much like the first time you heard Joy Division or early Pigface, for example, you'll experience being startled at first before becoming addicted to the band's unique microcosm of dystopia that is simultaneously corrupting and seducing your ears. - Morgan Y. Evans

The year in song reflected the state of the world around us. Here are the 70 songs that spoke to us this year.

70. The Horrors - "Machine"

On their fifth album V, the Horrors expand on the bright, psychedelic territory they explored with Luminous, anchoring the ten new tracks with retro synths and guitar fuzz freakouts. "Machine" is the delicious outlier and the most vitriolic cut on the record, with Faris Badwan belting out accusations to the song's subject, who may even be us. The concept of alienation is nothing new, but here the Brits incorporate a beautiful metaphor of an insect trapped in amber as an illustration of the human caught within modernity. Whether our trappings are technological, psychological, or something else entirely makes the statement all the more chilling. - Tristan Kneschke

"...when the history books get written about this era, they'll show that the music community recognized the potential impacts and were strong leaders." An interview with Kevin Erickson of Future of Music Coalition.

Last week, the musician Phil Elverum, a.k.a. Mount Eerie, celebrated the fact that his album A Crow Looked at Me had been ranked #3 on the New York Times' Best of 2017 list. You might expect that high praise from the prestigious newspaper would result in a significant spike in album sales. In a tweet, Elverum divulged that since making the list, he'd sold…six. Six copies.

Under the lens of cultural and historical context, as well as understanding the reflective nature of popular culture, it's hard not to read this film as a cautionary tale about the limitations of isolationism.

I recently spoke to a class full of students about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". Actually, I mentioned Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" by prefacing that I understood the likelihood that no one had read it. Fortunately, two students had, which brought mild temporary relief. In an effort to close the gap of understanding (perhaps more a canyon or uncanny valley) I made the popular quick comparison between Plato's often cited work and the Wachowski siblings' cinema spectacle, The Matrix. What I didn't anticipate in that moment was complete and utter dissociation observable in collective wide-eyed stares. Example by comparison lost. Not a single student in a class of undergraduates had partaken of The Matrix in all its Dystopic future shock and CGI kung fu technobabble philosophy. My muted response in that moment: Whoa!

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell at St. Mark's Church in New York City, 23 February 1977

Scholar Christopher Grobe crafts a series of individually satisfying case studies, then shows the strong threads between confessional poetry, performance art, and reality television, with stops along the way.

Tracing a thread from Robert Lowell to reality TV seems like an ominous task, and it is one that Christopher Grobe tackles by laying out several intertwining threads. The history of an idea, like confession, is only linear when we want to create a sensible structure, the "one damn thing after the next" that is the standing critique of creating historical accounts. The organization Grobe employs helps sensemaking.